Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an electronic rack labeling system for displaying electronic labels on a rack on which articles are placed, and more particularly to an electronic labeling system for electronically displaying prices of goods on goods display racks arranged in a store such as a supermarket. The present invention further relates to an electronic rack labeling system useful for efficient operation of a store such as in the event of change of display of goods, stock taking and ordering of supply.
Labels for displaying information to identify articles displayed on an article rack (hereinafter referred to as rack labels) are used in most stores and warehouses. The rack label is a small card made of paper on which name of article, feature of article and price are entered. Where such a paper card is used as the rack label, a huge amount of manpower is required to move and change the labels in order to change the display positions of the articles and to change the prices of the articles. When failure of change occurs, the articles may not be properly managed. In order to avoid the above problems, as disclosed in JP-A-62-166497, it has been proposed to provide electronic price display devices (rack price tag devices) on the display rack, transmit prices changed by a POS information management terminal to the electronic price display devices through an ultrasonic wave and automatically display the transmitted prices so that the contents of display of the rack labels are changed. It discloses the change of the prices of the electronic price display devices and the displays of the changed prices but it does not disclose the change of the display positions.
On the other hand, JP-A-2-278781 discloses a rack label constructed of an electronic price display device which is physically moveable along an entire surface of a rack. This electronic price display device is of cordless type which contains a power supply, an antenna and a receiver in a case and receives a command transmitted by wireless to display a price, change the displayed price, (display the changed price) and erase the price. The electrical price display device is fixed on the display rack and is physically moveable so that it may by repositioned manually.